Auctioneers

AUTUMN opened at Sotheby’s Sussex with a modest, but quite keenly bid for, furniture offering where the top sellers were two (7ft 6in (2.29m) William IV pine and oak bookcases.

Sotheby’s 236-lot Clocks, Watches and Barometers sale was the largest of the three held on September 20. Timed to capitalise on the recent opening of the Olympia saleroom, it brought £417,645 and was 73 per cent taken up by lot. This small olivewood marquetry longcase clock, c.1680, 7ft 6in (2.15m), by Joseph Knibb, stole the limelight.

Gordon Russell, the Cotswolds School designer, is now famous for his austere designs of utility furniture. Unfortunately for Russell, this means that his work is often neglected and undersold by owners who do not realise his significance in the history of Arts and Crafts design.

The September 20 auction of Doulton, Poole and Carlton ware at Christie’s South Kensington (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) was a three-part sale that gave two distinctly different performances.

“It never gets any easier, it only gets more difficult,” a dealer told Guy Schooling before Sworders’ autumn sale on 18 September. Certainly the Essex auctioneer was ready to assume the worst after a summer so quiet he had to cancel a general sale in August, but the market is also known for its unpredictability, and a frantic two weeks at the beginning of September brought more than 500 lots through the doors.

CANTERBURY Auction Galleries are celebrating the relaunch of their rooms after a £300,000 modernisation programme. The Lord Mayor of Canterbury, Councillor Fred Whitemore, will re-open the rooms on October 4, revealing, among other changes, a grand new slate staircase and entrance lobby, with new reception area.

An evening sale of contemporary ceramics, held by Phillips (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) on September 25 yielded a healthy set of overall statistics and some strong individual results. Just over three-quarters of the 200-odd lots changed hands (82 per cent in value terms) chalking up a net total of just under £390,000.

“THIS was a very good way to get the season rolling,” said auctioneer Ben Lloyd of this 371-lot sale at Mallams Oxford on 7 September from which only one lot remained unsold.

RELATIVELY quiet July and August sales caused a bit of a re-think at Gorringes: “After July we were a little bit worried,” said Lewes specialist Nick Muston. “There has been an adjustment in the market and we have adjusted prices accordingly.”

Fewer than half of the 128 lots that made up The Cat Sale at Bonhams & Brooks on September 12 found buyers, but while demand was distinctly patchy and only 10 of 22 works by one of the foremost contemporary exponents of feline portraiture, Anne Mortimer, found buyers, there was no stopping Louis Wain.

From the day it was delivered to Lord Yarborough in 1826, this Benjamin Vulliamy travelling clock had remained in the same family until it was sold at Hy Duke’s sale in Dorchester on September 20.

THE first UK clocks and watches sale after the summer lull presented a good opportunity to examine the health of a market which is notoriously prone to ups and downs. From results at Gardiner Houlgate, Bath, it would seem that the trade in gentleman’s pocket watches remains buoyant, while ladies’ wristwatches are still hard to shift.

One unexpected result enlivened an otherwise unexceptional sale of Continental decorative arts held by Christie’s South Kensington (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) on September 13.

A clutch of Oriental entries were among the more interesting works in the Amersham Auction Rooms’ otherwise run-of-the-mill offering of 324 antiques and collectables on 2 August.

Pictured are two modern firsts, both in rather chipped jackets, from the book section of a September 7 sale held by Mallams of Oxford. P.G. Wodehouse’s Uncle Fred in Springtime of 1939 was sold for £100, while Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop of the previous year reached £210.

ISAAC WARE’S Complete Body of Architecture, a calf bound 1768 edition illustrated, or rather “adorned” with engraved plates of “...plans and elevations from original designs... in which are interspersed some designs of Inigo Jones”, was one of a small group of architectural books that brought most of the higher bids in this Bearne's sale on 21 August.

Themed series are all the rage in the salerooms these days. September 25-28 has been designated Travel Week by Christie’s King Street rooms and will be given over to a series of sales devoted to voyages, exploration and discovery.

Sotheby’s annual jaunt north of the border to Gleneagles is as traditional to the Scottish leg of the ‘Season’ as the Oban ball and the first flexing of the Duke of Edinburgh’s trigger finger on the moors above Balmoral.

Good stock furniture attracted bidders to the first of these Staffordshire August sales on 15 August at Richard Wintertons, the best being a George III mahogany sofa table.

“One of their less distinguished sales. There were one or two decent things, but there was no heavyweight stuff...an example of too many auctions of marine things with not enough stock to go round.” Such was the assessment of one leading West End specialist dealer of Bonhams & Brooks (15/10% buyer’s premium) September 5 sale of Marine Works of Art.